Jackie's Newport

by Raymond Sinibaldi

  respects. Exiting, they stood in the hall, and Angie kissed her on both cheeks.

  She wept. In the elevator going back downstairs, the day overtook him and he, too, wept uncontrollably.

  Jackie loved the King James Bible. She was inspired by it and took

  comfort from it. A devotee of poetry and herself a poet, she also drew from the prayers of her faith. She chose Ecclesiastes for Jack’s funeral, and she, no doubt, took solace in one of her personal favorite passages: Saint Francis of Assisi’s “Prayer for Peace , ” which reads in part:

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  Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;

  To be understood as to understand;

  To be loved as to love;

  For it is in giving that we receive;

  It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

  And it is in dying that we are born into eternal life.

  In the darkest days of her life, Jackie lived by these words. It had

  started in Dallas, when Henry Gonzalez fell to his knees before her in

  the Parkland Hospital emergency room, and had just concluded with two

  men, among the world’s most powerful, who came seeking to console and

  were themselves consoled.

  Composing herself, she walked through the hall. John and the

  bittersweet celebration of his third birthday were waiting. Glancing up she noticed a solitary figure. It was a young woman whom she did not recognize, and she immediately wondered who this woman was and, more importantly,

  how she got there. Lee emerged from the sitting room to introduce the young lady, who was Mary Ann Ryan. Through the efforts of a White House aide,

  Irish police, Pan Am airlines, and New York customs officials, Mary had

  arrived for the mass all the way from Dunganstown in County Wexford,

  Ireland. She was a cousin of Jack’s, and they had met on Jack’s trip in June, when Jack had put an arm around her and told her, “You know, you look like a Kennedy. You have that Irish smile.”438

  Her Irish smile was gone, replaced with the sadness of Jack’s loss and

  the fact that she was now four thousand miles from home and knew nobody.

  Quickly understanding the young woman’s plight and realizing there was

  still more giving to be done, Jackie excused herself. She went into Jack’s bedroom and into his bureau drawer, returning with a set of his rosary beads for Mary and another religious artifact for her mother. Suddenly doors flew 197

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  open, and in a matter of minutes the hall was filled with people of all ages.

  The family had converged, and they swept up Mary, who instantaneously

  was no longer alone. She was one of them.

  In the sitting room the television was turned to NBC, airing the

  Johnson reception, when Willy Brandt appeared on the screen. Surprised,

  Jackie asked Bobby, “Why wasn’t Willy Brandt in the line downstairs?”

  Brandt was the mayor of West Berlin, and as “only” a mayor, he was not

  high ranking enough to warrant an invitation to the reception following the funeral. Lee, who had been in Berlin with Jack, commented to Jackie how

  much she was impressed by Brandt. Jackie herself recalled the fondness

  with which Jack had praised him upon his return. Forty-eight hours after Jack’s death, Brandt renamed the square where Kennedy had delivered his

  “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech John F. Kennedy Platz. It was a gesture that touched Jackie deeply.

  “Well, I want to see him,” 439 she said. Joe West made a phone call, and ten minutes later Mayor Brandt was waiting in the oval room.

  Bobby accompanied Jackie to the oval room, their emotional reserves

  gone, both completely exhausted. William Vanden Heuvel, an aide, said of Bobby, “I had never seen human pain expressed on someone’s face that way. It was as if he had been mortally wounded and of course he had…because they were so close.” And of Jackie he noted, “The country was held together…

  more than any other thing by Mrs. Kennedy. Her nobility, her strength, her courage…She just expressed it in a way that was eloquent without words;

  that one could be grief stricken so profoundly, yet understand that the

  responsibilities of life had to go on.” 440 One more time they would need to draw strength from a reservoir that was virtually depleted.

  They entered the room, and Brandt burst into tears. Consoling , Jackie asked about the renaming of the square. Acknowledging it while drying his eyes, Brandt told her it was not enough. He then asked permission to name a school after Jack. Jackie glanced at Bobby, who was now struggling to keep 198

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  his composure. “Fine,” was all he could say, and Jackie walked across the room to the window. Night had descended upon the city. The red beacon of the Washington Monument was flashing. Beyond, standing watch over the

  Potomac River, was the thirty-two-foot bronzed statue of Thomas Jefferson.

  The white dome of the Jefferson Memorial was now illuminated at night, by Jack’s order.

  “He can’t have this view anymore,” she said, still looking out the

  window, “but he can have John F. Kennedy Platz. Thank you for that.” 441

  Though her eyes filled with tears, they did not fall, and she did not falter. She turned to see that was not the case with her brother-in-law and the mayor, both of whom were openly weeping. Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console.

  Dave Powers provided the high-water mark of the evening, and he

  did so by simply being Dave Powers. With him since the winter of 1946,

  Dave had been an invaluable political asset to Jack, and along the way he had become one of his closest and most trusted friends.

  The evening was a cruel mix of a toddler’s birthday party and Irish wake, and it was Powers who directed them both. To the delight of the children, he was the leader of their band, marching in cadence, around the entire suite.

  The aunts and uncles, moms and dads, were regaled with Dave’s stories of his friend, bringing both laughter and tears. It was Jackie who suggested a sing-along with some of Jack’s favorite songs. It was quickly suggested that there was no piano in the room, to which Dave replied, “We Irish don’t need music to sing…The music’s inside us,” 442 and he broke into “That Old Gang of Mine.” “Heart of My Heart” followed, and it proved too much for Bobby, who fled the room.

  The children were put to bed, and the others dissipated to home or their respective rooms. It was not long before Bobby and Jackie found themselves alone. Five nights earlier, the two had sat in the very same room and talked for nearly an hour about the pending trip to Texas. Bobby had wondered

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  how sure Jackie was that she was ready to absorb the rigors of this intense dip into the political pool of Jack’s pending reelection campaign. There was a vibrant palpability to the surreal component surrounding them. However, the grotesque reality and regal splendor of the past three days were all too real. Jack was gone. And Bobby knew now and forevermore that there was

  nothing Jackie could not absorb, nothing she could not endure. He looked at her. “Shall we go see our friend?” he asked. 443

  Jackie called downstairs, waking Clint Hill, who had dozed off in his

  chair. “Yes, Mrs. Kennedy.”

  “Mr. Hill,” she said, “Bobby and I want to go to Arlington. We want to

  see the flame.”

  “Certainly, Mrs. Kennedy,” Hill replied. “I’ll get the car.”444

  Hill had called ahead to Arlington, alerting them of the possibility of

  this visit. A second call was made to alert Superintendent Metzler that they were on their way.

  On her way downstairs Jackie gathered a small bouquet of white lilies

  o
f the valley from a vase in the hallway. They retraced the path the cortege had followed just a few hours earlier, traveling over the Memorial Bridge, only this time a flame danced, flickering on the hillside below the Custis Lee Mansion. It was a moving, powerful moment. They left the vehicles, walking through the darkness among the cedar and oak trees, the flame flickering before them. A small white picket fence now surrounded the grave, and

  military caps were sprinkled throughout the flowers and the pines. The most conspicuous was a green beret from a member of the Special Forces team

  Jack had founded.

  They knelt together, the widow and the president’s brother, while the

  shimmering blue flame flirted with the nighttime November breeze. They

  prayed, heads bowed, and the Capitol clocks struck midnight. Jackie rose and placed her lilies next to the flame. Taking Bobby’s hand, they walked 200

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  through the small gate of the white fence and into the darkness, toward the lights of the nation’s capital.

  With silent, stoic grandeur Jackie Kennedy seared the soul of America. Bold and stouthearted, she walked out of Parkland Hospital, her hand gently

  resting on Jack’s coffin. With an abiding conviction, she refused to change her blood-stained suit, facing the world wearing the scars of her personal horror. With dignified majesty she held the hands of her children while

  their father’s flag-draped coffin left the White House for the final time.

  In a solemn woeful moment, standing at the foot of the thirty-six Capitol steps, again with her children in hand, she watched as their daddy’s casket was removed from the caisson. The Marine Corps band played “Hail to the

  Chief,” piercing her heart, and for seconds, only seconds, she lowered her head and wept, her shoulders shuddering in the spasm of her shattered soul.

  Standing stately in the Capitol Rotunda, she watched while her husband was placed on the catafalque, and with statuesque poise she listened while men of power eulogized him. With nurturing genteelness, she led Caroline to the bier, kneeling and gently kissing the flag that covered Jack’s coffin before, hand in hand, mother and daughter exited down those same thirty-six steps.

  Elegant, erect, and valiant, she walked behind his horse-drawn caisson from the White House to St. Matthew’s Cathedral. With a delicate tenderness she comforted her daughter, who during her daddy’s funeral was overcome,

  crushed with the magnitude of her loss. With a soft, loving whisper she

  brought her three-year-old son to attention, and he saluted his daddy’s flag-draped coffin. With a stirring grace she ignited the flame at his graveside, ensuring that her husband would eternally pass the torch to new generations of Americans. With courage and august nobility she walked, head held high behind a black veil, brave and polished, daunted not broken, but steadfast and determined that her husband would not be lost to history or forgotten by 201

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  his people. The mighty of the world walked behind her, and with the bold conviction of every step, she stared down the face of evil, which took him from her.

  Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy, the woman with no official government

  title or function, led the world to Arlington National Cemetery to lay to rest her “beloved Jack Kennedy, thirty-fifth president of the United States.” She set out to mark his place in the history of his country. She became the symbol of American courage, grace, strength, resilience, and determination and thus marked her place as well.

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  “I’ll bring them all together now.”

  Jacqueline Kennedy

  Jackie set out immediately to the task of cementing Jack’s legacy, the

  anchors of which would be his final resting place in Arlington and the

  John F. Kennedy Library. In the weekend following Thanksgiving, just

  days after Jack’s burial, Jackie met with author and presidential historian Theodore White. She told him of their habit of listening to records before bedtime, and Jack’s favorite was Camelot, the long-running Broadway musical about King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table. It ended with the following verse: “Never let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.”

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  “There’ll be great presidents again,” Jackie told White, “but they’ll never be another Camelot.”445 Henceforth for decades, the Kennedy presidency

  bore the moniker “Camelot.”

  Simultaneously, Jackie was working on reuniting Patrick and Arabella

  with their father. “I’ll bring them together now,” she told Dave Powers on the flight back from Dallas, and that’s precisely what she set out to do. Within days, exhumation orders were issued as Cardinal Cushing, Frank Morrissey, Teddy Kennedy, and “Mummy” rallied, each assuming a role in reuniting

  Jack with his children.

  In the darkness of the early night and behind Arlington’s locked gates,

  Jackie, her sister Lee, Bobby, Ted and Joan Kennedy, and Patricia Kennedy Lawford gathered as Bishop Philip Hannan prayed and blessed the graves.

  Jackie’s still-born baby girl whom they named Arabella, was buried in the children’s section of St. Columba’s Cemetery in Middletown, Rhode Island, across the bay from Newport. She was buried with her dad in December of 1963, and the family donated her vacated grave to a priest.

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  Under the glow of the flickering flame Jackie had lit only nine days earlier, Patrick and Arabella were laid to rest, one on each side of their father.

  Filled with doubts and recriminations of faith and life—and how could

  she not be—she reproached God. “I am trying to make my peace with God,”

  she wrote Father Leonard. “I am so bitter against God…I think God must

  have taken Jack to show the world how lost we would be without him…a

  strange way of thinking to me and God will have some explaining to do to me, if I ever see him. But I promise you, I won’t be bitter or bring up my children in a bitter way…I have to think there is a God, or I have no hope of finding Jack again…If I am mad at God, at least I love you who are His servant…And if you pray and I do too, maybe I will change, I will try.”446

  The original grave of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy in Brookline, Massachusetts. He too was exhumed in December 1963 and reinterred with his dad just days after his father was buried.

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  In the JFK Memorial Issue of Look Magazine in November 1964, Jackie made her last public comments regarding Jack’s death. “Now I think I should have known that he was magic all along…I did know it, but I should have

  guessed that it could not last. I should have known that it was asking too much to dream that I might have grown old with him and see our children grow up together…He is free and we must live. Those who love him most know that

  ‘the death you have dealt is more than the death which has swallowed you.’”

  It was late in 1981, and Jackie was strolling down a New York street,

  following lunch with author Edward Klein. She was editing one of Klein’s novels, and as they walked together, the conversation turned to her children.

  Caroline was working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and sharing a

  West Side apartment with two roommates, and John was in his junior year

  at Brown University. “What do you tell your children about the relationship between you and President Kennedy?” Klein asked her.

  “I’d rather not think about the past,” she responded. “Please, let’s not talk about the past,” she added as if for emphasis. “I have to remain alive for myself. I don’t want to dredge up the past.”447

  All that Jackie had become as first lady (the elegance, the grace, the

  style) and all that she had become as a widow (the personifica
tion of dignity, courage, and strength) ultimately grew into America’s manifestation of its own grief and the world’s symbol of its own pain.

  Jackie had to leave her past behind, for it was her only chance to grasp the now. “She never wanted public notice,” said Ted Kennedy at her eulogy.

  “In part, I think, because it brought back painful memories of unbearable sorrow endured in the glare of a million lights.”

  She would leave behind Hyannis Port and Hammersmith Farm, both

  vessels of her painful past, replacing them in 1978 with the purchase of a four-hundred-acre estate on Martha’s Vineyard, where her penchant for

  both privacy and the sea were satisfied. And where there were no reminders of what once was, only memories to be made. Today it belongs to Caroline 206

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  and her family, with its cauldron of yesterdays shared with her mother, her husband, and her children.

  “Whenever you drive from the bridge from Washington into Virginia,”

  Jackie told Teddy White, “you see the Lee mansion on the side of the hill in the distance. When Caroline was very little, the mansion was one of the first things she learned to recognize. Now at night, you can see his flame beneath the mansion, from miles away.”448

  Today she has found Jack again, and together they sleep with Patrick

  and Arabella beneath “his flame,” which she lit more than fifty autumns ago, having graced the history of her country and the lives of those who loved her.

  And on the shores of Narragansett Bay, across the emerald lawn of

  Hammersmith Farm, the sea still kisses the sand. If you pause and listen closely, Arlington today. When Jackie first visited Arlington she was 11 years old and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier held but one, fallen from World War I. Today she rests beneath the flame she herself lit on November 25, 1963, her son’s third birthday, with Jack, Patrick and Arabella.

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  you will hear the whispers of an autumn long ago. Long before Camelot, and long before Jack. They’re the whispers of a thirteen-year-old girl, following her first summer of “looking at the bay and drinking in the beauty.”